While researchers in various areas have long supported open science principles, the ways in which science is currently institutionalised will need to be modified to enable the implementation of those principles. There are career barriers; there are conflicting demands and researchers receive conflicting messages about the value of open science to their work. The guidance they receive is too generic and sometimes contradictory. In addition, there are strong constraints for opening science to society (e.g. citizen science) and there is a lack of knowledge among researchers about the wide variety of methods to open up scientific processes. The same holds for private parties involved in science, e.g. through public-private partnerships. Although the potential impact of open science on society by making scientific knowledge available to new users is huge, many potential new users are unaware of this, or they lack the skills to find relevant information. With the enormous growth of freely available publications and data, new users might get lost in their search for information, or draw wrong conclusions.

The solution

Raise awareness among all stakeholders of best practices in support of open science.

Train and support students and researchers in open science principles, their societal responsibility and role, and in extending the impact of their work to society at large.

Develop new types of services to researchers in support of open science and train support staff (for instance in ICT services and libraries) to deliver these services.

Identify and acknowledge barriers to career progression at the European level.

Involve researchers, by discipline if required, in compiling research data management and software sustainability protocols that fit their disciplines' requirements and needs, and publish those protocols for public reference.

Train and educate new user groups in searching and finding academic information.

Identify the new users, what they need and how they can be helped and supported best;

Build platforms of new user groups to create communities and ensure their permanent involvement.

Concrete actions

National authorities and European Commission: acknowledge the value of open science in scientific evaluation and funding; develop strategies to involve new users in the scientific process through Horizon 2020.

Research funders and Research Performing Organisations: adopt a positive, integrated approach of career progression systems to remove obstacles that impede open science practices; raise awareness and promote open science in universities and other knowledge institutions. Develop training and skills, tailored to each discipline, including ICT and library personnel etc. Involve new user groups through platforms and otherwise and give them the opportunity to take up a role when funding projects.

All actors: foster the existing relations between science, society and business, and develop training and skills for all parties to help them seize opportunities that promote open science.

Expected positive effects

A broader uptake of open science working practices among researchers;

A quicker uptake of new working methods in the scientific community and faster development of new research tools;

Better connections between science and society;

Better science by involving citizens;

Better, more and quicker solutions for societal challenges and better, more and quicker market opportunities;

Provision of training for the public in understanding research made available to European citizens in the form of online course or in public institutions such as libraries, schools or universities

Initiate and support experimental and safe spaces to train and learn open science principles. To learn what can work and what does not!

Integrate the open science philosophy and how that leads to letting go of striving for publications in 'high impact factor journals' (but rather in open access journals) into education programs starting at student-level

Anonymous

Anonymous

Marijtje Jongsma - VAWO scientists' union

In my opinion, the emphasis should be more on education and training end instead on citizen’s science. We need to educate and train a new generation of scientists at our university with respect to integrity, open science, academic freedom etc.

Therefore, it would be good to have a separate chapter in the call for action with “education” in the title. Independent academic research and independent academic education need to be fully integrated, especially where the Universities are involved.

Unknown User (urn:collab:person:uva.nl:mstokho1)

Involving new users, acknowledging the relevance of ‘citizen science’ is laudable. The text clearly identifies a number of things that need to be done to make that a reality. But what it fails to note explicitly is that this is an effort that requires extra time and hence extra money, and it also fails to identify the stakeholders that should be putting up that extra money. Without that it will have to come from the budgets of universities and funders that are already under severe pressure in many countries. The willingness of these stake holders to take on this extra task, at the cost of their increasingly under-funded main tasks can be questioned

Martin Stokhof, on behalf of the Open Access Working Group of the European Research Council

Proposed changes:

The problem

While researchers in various areas have long supported open science principles, the ways in which science is currently institutionalised will need to be modified to enable the implementation of those principles. There are career barriers; there are conflicting demands and researchers receive conflicting messages about the value of open science to their work. The guidance they receive is too generic and sometimes contradictory. In addition, there are strong constraints for opening science to society (e.g. citizen science) and there is a lack of knowledge among researchers about the wide variety of methods to open up scientific processes. The same holds for private parties involved in science, e.g. through public-private partnerships. Although the potential impact of open science on society by making scientific knowledge available to new users is huge, many potential new users are unaware of this, or they lack the skills to find relevant information. With the enormous growth of freely available publications and data, new users might get lost in their search for information, or draw wrong conclusions. Remedying these flaws in the system requires substantial extra funds, since the financial possibilities of many universities and other research institutions are already stretched to their limits.

The solution

Raise awareness among all stakeholders of best practices in support of open science.

Train and support students and researchers in open science principles, their societal responsibility and role, and in extending the impact of their work to society at large.

Develop new types of services to researchers in support of open science and train support staff (for instance in ICT services and libraries) to deliver these services.

Supply the necessary additional funds to universities and other research institutions to provide such training and facilities.

Identify and acknowledge barriers to career progression at the European level.

Involve researchers, by discipline if required, in compiling research data management and software sustainability protocols that fit their disciplines' requirements and needs, and publish those protocols for public reference.

Train and educate new user groups in searching and finding academic information.

Identify the new users, what they need and how they can be helped and supported best;

Build platforms of new user groups to create communities and ensure their permanent involvement.

Concrete actions

National authorities and European Commission: acknowledge the value of open science in scientific evaluation and funding; develop strategies to involve new users in the scientific process through Horizon 2020; supply the necessary additional funds to universities and other research institutions to implement these strategies.

Research funders and Research Performing Organisations: adopt a positive, integrated approach of career progression systems to remove obstacles that impede open science practices; raise awareness and promote open science in universities and other knowledge institutions. Develop training and skills, tailored to each discipline, including ICT and library personnel etc. Involve new user groups through platforms and otherwise and give them the opportunity to take up a role when funding projects.

All actors: foster the existing relations between science, society and business, and develop training and skills for all parties to help them seize opportunities that promote open science.

Expected positive effects

A broader uptake of open science working practices among researchers;

A quicker uptake of new working methods in the scientific community and faster development of new research tools;

Better connections between science and society;

Better science by involving citizens;

Better, more and quicker solutions for societal challenges and better, more and quicker market opportunities;

Anonymous

on behalf of Creative Commons Europe

It is crucial for researchers to communicate scientific results accurately. But if researchers wish to involve new users and citizens into the activities and sharing of open science, they need to stop treating these audiences as “users [who] might get lost in their search for information, or draw wrong conclusions.” If we presume a default of open, we need to get comfortable with sharing—which sometimes means giving up some control—so that others can benefit. With openness in policy and practice, the communication of science can benefit not only its intended audience, but promote novel and interesting types of re-use across disciplines and and by non-traditional users.

A few years ago, a group of Wikipedians built the Open Access Media Importer (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Open_Access_Media_Importer_Bot), which crawls open access scholarly publication databases for supplementary audio and video materials and then uploads these materials to Wikimedia Commons. Those audio and video materials are being used to populate Wikipedia articles about those research topics, in a way that helps for the research to be read and understood by a general audience, and in different languages.

Anonymous

what is clearly missing here is the issue of participation and the integration of different sorts of expertise in scientific knowledge production and vice versa. by simply informing or training stakeholders in open science we would replicate the deficit model. what is needed are robust participatory approaches that can stretch into research design and method development. furthermore, best practice and skills for collaboration and sharing are to be found not necessarily always in academic practice. open science is learning from other domains as well! this would need experimental spaces or pilot spaces where openness can be enacted in that regard. Katja Mayer / Uni Vienna

Anonymous

Under 'The solution', fourth bullet point:

"Identify and acknowledge barriers to career progression at the European level." There are certainly very many barriers to career progression - I suppose what is meant here are barriers due to the incompatibility of the current assessment and reward system with open science practices. This should be clearly formulated along these lines.

Anonymous

“Directions for Research Data Management” (http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/5951/4/JR0034_RDM_report_200315_v5.pdf), a report developed collaboratively by Jisc with ARMA, SCONUL, UCISA, RUGIT and RLUK, makes numerous recommendations on behalf of library, IT and research office staff – we feel that the recommendations of this report should be examinedt, and that the needs of these groups in supporting open research practices should be taken into account.

We would be keen to see encouragement for the integration of data skills into both post-graduate and undergraduate study. Data literacy is a valuable component of digital citizenship, and acts as a stepping-stone for the next generation of research practitioners and support staff.

Build services that researchers will want to use, and which will seamlessly bring them up to speed with Open Science practices.

Concrete actions:

Funders: Fund libraries and data centers to facilitate seamless integration of repositories into a service oriented, internet approach.

Research communities and RPOs: Include young researchers and student organizations in the dialogue to avoid top-down approach only.

Consider and engage researcher networks as active/integral services in the scholarly communication environment (linking to publications, data and software).

Funders: Encourage the use of innovative dissemination process of science for outreach to new users to introduce and engage them in Open Science. Include skilled personnel (e.g., educators) which will translate science in a way they understand. Allow special scoring in proposal evaluation for novel dissemination of scientific results when appropriate.